Cross, Toureen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Crosses & Monuments
Inside a church at Toureen in County Tipperary, fixed to the eastern wall with cement, are two stone fragments that together form what was once a free-standing cross.
It is not a dramatic monument by any measure, but the way it survives, broken and re-mounted indoors, raises quiet questions about what it once looked like and how it came to be preserved in this way rather than left to weather or disappear entirely.
The cross is rectangular in profile rather than the ringed or elaborately carved form more commonly associated with early Irish ecclesiastical sites. The upper shaft and arms were carved from a single piece of stone, and a small rectangular tenon at the base of the lower shaft, a projecting peg of stone just 35mm high, suggests it was originally fitted with some kind of cap or base element. The surviving height of the assembled fragments is just under 1.3 metres. One arm remains intact; the other is broken, and significantly there is no mortise, no corresponding socket cut into the stone, to indicate that a separate arm was ever fitted. This detail, noted by Waddell and Holland in 1990, points toward the cross having been carved in its current form rather than assembled from separately worked pieces. At the centre of the arms is a small circular depression, a subtle feature on an otherwise plain surface. The cross is associated with the church recorded nearby, and its current position cemented to an interior wall reflects a later decision to protect or consolidate the fragments rather than any original arrangement.